谘詢公司知識管理研討（英文版）(ppt 28頁)

谘詢公司知識管理研討（英文版）內容提要：
What is ‘consulting’?
The Collins English Dictionary reveals that to consult is to make oneself available to give professional advice, especially at scheduled times and for a fee. The term ‘consult’ originates in the medical profession. There a consultant is a physician who is asked to confirm a diagnosis; or it is a physician (or surgeon) who holds the highest appointment in a particular branch of medicine or surgery in a hospital. The consultant is therefore someone – mostly a specialist – who is asked to give expert advice or information.
……

The management consultant
The management consultant is a special breed of consultant.
Personification of the knowledge economy;
Anti-thesis to Ford’s assembly-line worker.
Symbolises the ‘future’ of work: not dirty, not heavy-duty, not manual, not monotonous, not de-skilled, not de-humanized, not badly paid; but flexible, creative, international, demanding, cross-cultural, well-paid, technologically advanced, fun.
The idol of today’s working world; it is one of the main ‘drivers’ of the business of business education
Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co., The Boston Consulting Group and Mercer (to name but a few) are the archetypal companies of today’s global ‘informational’ capital, which attract the ‘highest calibre’ graduates.
……

Knowledge Management and Management Knowledge
Jackson and Carter write: “Management knowledge…constitutes a relatively homogeneous canon that claims to be able to improve organizational efficiency (and, thereby, profit, though the link is rarely demonstrable), in particular through the adoption of specific techniques for the use of labour. The general objective of these techniques is to enable units of labour to be more productive – that is, to work harder”
For Jackson and Carter, management knowledge is thus “an ideologically based canon, biased in favour of an essentially capitalist interest. It functions as part of the techno-mediatic hegemony that sustains this dominant discourse”.

..............................